there comes a point where the metal becomes brittle in the area that is being bent. Eventually, it simply breaks. It's difficult to predict the exact time when that point will occur. Trump is like that. He's being bent sharply, again and again, by those who oppose him. Over and over again, he has survived that bending, but, like that bar of steel, metal fatigue is inexorably occurring.

Will he break now or sometime later? I can't predict, but I can predict that there will be a time when the break happens. We will know it at once when it occurs. For now, though, we can only keep repeating the cycle of bending him over and over again. It will happen, if we just do that.

Stalin is protesting from Hell about your analogy.

Inside that flesh there is a person. It is the person who breaks, not the body.

is frightening. Every time I think trump couldn't get worse, he does. A wag the dog scenario with a nuclear power on China's border is surely unthinkable to even trump and the gop, right? A nuclear holocaust to distract from trump's criminal enterprises? trump wouldn't do that, would he? I don't know if there is anything trump wouldn't do. Hitler had his Gotterdammerung toward the end of WW2. trump is IMO no less evil than Hitler.

but trump is irrational and erratic. Hopefully, he won't be able to unilaterally pull out of South Korea, but if he does, it can probably be reversed when he is gone. Perhaps I am slightly paranoid about what he will do as a distraction.

That is to say, people with inexplicably indestructible respectability or credibility among the Very Serious People who shamelessly front for crooks like Trump, gaslighting the public that what they're seeing with their own horrified eyes isn't so very bad. In fact, it's not bad at all, but is really almost good. Scratch that, it IS good to see the durability of our system of government put to a stress test like this. Sure, some* particularly vulnerable people might experience some bad consequences, but adversity builds character if you're not one of the privileged like Andrew Sullivan. And why didn't you choose to be privileged, huh? Losers!

*"Some" defined as no more than 200 million Americans, 250 million tops.